1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to delivery of embedded media objects.
2. Related Art
In computer communication networks, one method of communication is email (“electronic mail”), in which a sending user prepares and sends a message to a receiving user. Email is well suited to relatively short messages, such as text. However, when the sending user wishes to send a relatively larger amount of information, such as a media document (one example of a media document is a video clip), known email systems are subject to several drawbacks.
A first drawback of known email systems is that a media document can be larger than the maximum size of messages for which the email system is designed. For example, some known email systems are unable to deliver messages longer than about 500 kilobytes in size, while many media documents can be several megabytes in size.
A second drawback of known email systems is that a relatively large media document can take a correspondingly large amount of time (and other resources) to deliver from the sending user to the receiving user. In known email systems, delivery and presentation of the media document to the receiving user is triggered by the receiving user's email client device. The receiving user might therefore be forced to wait a substantial time for the media document to be delivered and be available for presentation. Moreover, if a number of receiving users all attempt to access media documents at substantially the same time, an email server for those receiving users can become overloaded, thus degrading the receiving users' experience further.
Accordingly it would be desirable to have a technique for delivery of embedded media objects, such as for example media documents, that is not subject to drawbacks of the known art.
These advantages and others are provided in an embodiment of the invention, described herein, including a technique in which media documents and other relatively larger documents can be delivered from a sender to a recipient and presented to the recipient with reduced use of time and other resources.